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Trotsky's Conception of Self-Organisation and the Vanguard

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Trotsky's Conception of Self-Organisation and the Vanguard Ernest Mandel Trotsky’s conception of self-organisation and the vanguard party (November 1989) Revised version of a paper submitted to the Internationales Symposium Leo Trotzki – Kritiker und Verteidiger der Sowjetgesellschaft, Wuppertal 26-29 March 1990. This version first published in French in Quatrième Internationale, No.36, pp.35- 49. Translated by Mike Murray for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive. The relationship between the self organisation of the working class and the organisation of its vanguard constitutes one of the most complicated problems of Marxism. Until now this problem has not been treated in a systematic manner, neither in the light of theory nor against the empirical facts of workers’ struggle accumulated over one hundred and fifty years. Even though Engels (more so than Marx) touched on this problem in numerous letters and articles [1], this lack of treatment holds true for the founders of scientific socialism as well. When one reviews the best known works which have been dedicated to this problem – Lenin’s What is to be Done; Rosa Luxemburg’s Organisational Yuestions of the Russian Social Democracy; Kautsky’s writings against Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks; The Infantile Disorder of Lenin and Bauer’s Illegal Party – it appears that they are all of a polemical nature and have, therefore, a circumstantial and fragmentary aspect. The early writings of Lukács, History and Class Consciousness and Lenin, are at such a high level of abstraction that they are unable to systematically analyse this theme. Nevertheless, when one looks at the complete works of several classical Marxists, one gets a different impression. For more than a quarter of a century Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg touched on this problem – central both to the theory and practice of Marxism. Their successive writings certainly do not reflect a fixed position but give the impression of a maturing process, nourished by experience. And that is precisely the reason why one may construct an integrated theory in speaking of their work even if the question of whether these authors – who never elaborated such a theory themselves – would acknowledge its validity. [2] Trotsky can be distinguished from them by the fact that, having lived longer than Lenin and Rosa, he was able to come at the problem of class and party, self-organisation and the vanguard party during forty years of rich and varied experience of the workers’ movement in a whole series of countries. He assimilated the new phenomena of fascism and Stalinism and the evolving problems of the struggle against them. At the same time – and maybe for precisely that reason – his contributions on the theme of class and party, self-organisation and the organisation of the vanguard, have a greater heterogeneity than those of Lenin and Luxemburg. Trotsky changed his fundamental position on this question at least five times, even if there may be a common ‘red thread’ running through his successive positions. So while one may be able to try and tease out a synthesis of the conceptions of Lenin and Rosa, in the case of Trotsky, one must try to draw an account of his evolution. This evolution results in a response to the problem in question, which he proposes towards the end of his life. The dangers of a centralised vanguard party in the absence of self-organisation in the working class (1902-1905) As is well known, Trotsky was fully on the side of Lenin, Plekhanov and Martov in their fight against the ‘economists’ at the time of the first Iskra. Lenin regarded his contribution highly and called him ‘our pen’. It was Lenin who had him accepted as the youngest member of the editorial board of Iskra. From the time of the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP, which produced a separation and a provisional split [3] between the congress majority (Bolsheviks) and the minority (Mensheviks), Trotsky aligned himself to the minority. His polemic against Lenin was outlined in his pamphlet Our Political Tasks (1904), which is above all known for the passage which has come to be seen as both dramatic and prophetic in the light of the ultimate evolution of the CP and the history of the Soviet Union: “As far as the internal politics of the party are concerned, these methods lead, as we will see later on, to the organisation of the party replacing the party, the central committee replacing the organisation of the party and, finally, that a dictator replaces the central committee; what is more they lead to a situation where committees elaborate and abrogate ‘directives’ while the ‘people remain inactive’.” [4] Many of Lenin’s adversaries, as well as some historians, conclude on the basis of the course of events that on this problem history has shown Trotsky to be right and Lenin to be wrong. [5] They reproach Trotsky for having reviewed his position from the beginning of 1917 and to have wrongly qualified his attitude taken after the 2nd party congress. [6] In reality, one must consider that Trotsky, as well as the Mensheviks and Rosa Luxemburg, largely misinterpreted Lenin. They tore the theses of What is to be Done? from their concrete context – and the conditions prevailing at the time – in order to give them a universal character. [7] For Lenin, it was necessary to clarify the immediate tasks of an illegal party in order to prepare a large and autonomous mass movement of the working class. His pamphlet had no other aim. It certainly did not have the intention to elaborate a general theory on the relationship between class and party, in which the former has to be subordinated in the long term to the latter and has to be placed under its paternalist control. In the same pamphlet Lenin wrote these lines that clearly resonate as Trotskyist/Luxemburgist: “A professional revolutionary organisation has no significance except in relation with a truly revolutionary class which is engaged in spontaneous combat...everyone will probably agree that the ‘principal of greater democracy’ implies two firm conditions: firstly, complete openness and, secondly, election to all offices...We would call the German SPD a democratic organisation, because everything is done openly, including the meetings of the party congress.” [8] After the experience of the revolution of 1905, he reinforced and restated this position in a partly self critical fashion, in that which concerned the ‘stick too twisted in one direction’: “It should be understood that the principal reason for this success resides in the fact that the working class, of which the best elements are social democratic, distinguishes itself, for objective economic reasons, from all the classes of capitalist society by a greater aptitude for self-organisation. Without this condition, the organisation of professional revolutionaries would have been a toy, an adventure, a mere façade without nothing behind it.” And in the same text: “From 1903 to 1907 ... in spite of the split, social democracy has given to the public the greatest information on the internal situation (official report of the 2nd common congress, the 3rd Bolshevik party congress, and from the common 4th congress or the common congress of Stockholm). In spite of this split, the social democratic party, before all other parties, knew how to profit from this fleeting liberty in order to create a legal organisation with an ideal democratic regime, an electoral system and representation at congress in relation to the number of organised members in the party.” [9] The Menshevik alternative underestimated the constraints of illegality, the threat to the continued activity of the class, the necessary, but difficult, centralisation of the experience of a fragmented struggle and, above all, the vital struggle for political autonomy, and ultimately for the hegemony of the working class in revolution. The split resulting from the 2nd party congress already contained the latent seeds of ultimate political differentiation between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks concerning the role of the Russian bourgeoisie in the imminent revolution. But that position did not apply to Rosa Luxemburg and certainly not to Trotsky who, in the context of the political autonomy of the proletariat in the Russian revolution, didn’t hold the Menshevik position at all, but a position to the left of the Bolsheviks. The position is encapsulated in the slogan ‘permanent revolution’. [11] It was completely confirmed by the course of the revolution of 1917. It was developed in a practically identical manner by Lenin in the April Theses, probably without him having read Trotsky’s writings on the question of 1904-1906. [12] Nevertheless, it is true that, if Lenin succeeded in shrugging off all inclinations of ‘substitutionism’ in the course of the diverse phases of the rise of mass activity, that was certainly not the case for the majority of the ‘old Bolsheviks’. This explains why they took a waiting, not to say a frankly critical, attitude to the constitution of the Petrograd Soviet in 1905, and why they didn’t decide until later on to join and fully support it. [13] It is certainly to Trotsky’s merit to have first recognised that the soviet was the most complete expression of the self-organisation of the working class, produced by history itself, as much as the future form of workers’ power. That which Lenin expressed in State and Revolution and to that which Gramsci, and later the Comintern, gave a theoretical social basis, was already anticipated by Trotsky in his pamphlet The Balance sheet and perspectives. [14] Workers councils are the organs of the proletarian revolution. They cannot exist in non-revolutionary times. Experiments with the form of workers’ councils as attempted by the Dutch communists Gorter and Pannekoek, as well as those of the German KPD have been refuted by historical experience.
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